More in our series following one man’s sometimes funny, sometimes fraught and oft-times harrowing journey through a 20-odd-year career in arboriculture.

IT was two years ago now that I woke up to the fact that I’d had enough and felt that it was time to hand my business on. Negative? Yes, it was, but I excuse myself because of what I’d been through with the bureaucrats, chronic and unrelenting pain from various injuries and all the rest.

I’m sure if you’re reading this then you too have come to the realisation that tree surgery is a very hard way to make a living. I lasted 32 years before I was finally ready to hand the business to my son and it was actually only the last two of these that I became fed up. The first three decades were fine ... mostly.

The point of these stories isn’t to paint a gloomy picture, but to share experiences and laugh a bit along the way. Around 2003–4 something insignificant happened that was noteworthy only for being annoying. 

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It was summer and we had a work experience type for a week or so, sent from the local comprehensive school. He was pleasant enough, but painfully quiet and also astonishingly unskilled. He really didn’t know anything and he matched his lack of knowledge with a similar inability to recognise the most basic task.

“Rake all the cuttings up and put them into the tonne bag, Ian,” I told him one summer morning (he wasn’t actually called Ian). When I returned 10 minutes later I found him trying to rake up with his bare hands. “Why didn’t you use the rake?”

“I didn’t know what that was,” he whispered, looking sad and embarrassed.

“Never mind.” I handed him a telescopic rake that we had at the time. It wasn’t brilliant, but took up very little room in the back of the old Defender 90.

A little later I found him crawling along with the three-foot un-extended rake on hands and knees and I had to demonstrate that I hadn’t in fact bought a children’s play version of this tool, but a clever extendable version.

Later, I learned another of the men on the team hadn’t realised the same thing and had been using the short version for several months. He confided that to me after the work experience lad had left. I’m not sure why. I’d have kept quiet.

Anyway, the trainee’s lack of common sense was relevant because it illustrates why I was so cautious about keeping the employees safe. They couldn’t always be trusted and it led me into a trap of my own making.

One evening I returned home to an answering machine message along the following lines: “We have a tree with a large, dangerous branch over the canal. Can you come and have a look?”

It had been a long day with the new bloke, teaching him how to put hedge cuttings in a bag, how to do up a seat belt, make tea for everyone and (believe it or not) how to eat his lunch.

As it was a nice summer’s evening, I hopped onto a 1200 cc Suzuki Bandit and rode over to check it out. It was a large ash in a rear garden, backing onto the Kennet and Avon canal. 

“It looks imbalanced,” the customer said, mainly because it was.

The branch was disproportionately large, probably because the tree had been regularly pollarded, but only the height and the easy bits on the inside. It stuck out at right angles and although it was over the canal by a couple of metres, it was an easy job.

The access, however, was not. There was no way into the back garden without going through the house and the customer wanted all the arisings removed (of course she did). The answer was to lower the branch in sections onto the towpath, cut them into logs and brash and drag them to a chipper and truck for disposal at a convenient pull-in a few dozen yards away. That is what I should have done, quietly and unobtrusively setting about the work one half-day, if she accepted the quote. Which she did, all £300 of it, which wasn’t a lot really.

Being cautious, I then made the mistake of asking the authority in charge if I could use their towpath for the disposal of the waste. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Of course I cannot advocate trespass, encourage readers to ignore the authorities or take liberties with other people’s land, so my recommendation, in hindsight, for anyone in a similar position is to do the following: put in a big enough quote to start with, enter rear garden through the house, cut tree, drag brash through house, redecorate.

The scenario is flawed in that it doesn’t allow for the fact that you still need to notify the Canal Trust or British Waterways or whoever it is, but the point I’m trying to make is that you are avoiding the issue of directly using the authority’s land for disposal. Redecorating the hallway would have taken less time.

It started with a phone call, during which I was told I’d need to apply in writing. I did so, sending the email and expecting someone to respond: “Yes, that’s fine. It’s only a very small branch. We don’t mind at all.”

That didn’t happen. Someone had decided they needed a full description of the work required along with an idea of dates and timings, so I obliged, setting a date in a month’s time, then getting on with my other work.

Each day work was getting more demanding due to the hired help.

“Where’s the hedge cutter?” I asked, after noticing its absence.

“It’s in the garden where we were working, on the lawn,” said Ian.

“You didn’t put it in the truck then?”

“No, you didn’t say …”

Well, no I hadn’t ‘said’, but that was because I thought it was blatantly obvious. I went back to get the machine, got tangled in a chat with the customer and eventually returned home to an email from the waterways people asking for a risk assessment and method statement.

I punched out a standard one and then added some bits about water, hand washing because of leptospirosis and Weil’s disease then sent it off, pleased the job was now – in my mind – underway.

Later in the week I went to check on my assistant to see how he was coping with a big raking project on a large hedge on the far side of a manor garden we were working in. The young man had been busy, but not very useful.

“Why have you created 47 small piles of hedge cuttings, rather than two or three big ones?” I asked.

“Oh, sorry,” said Ian, looking crestfallen. “You didn’t say how many piles you wanted …”

Back at home was another email, rejecting my RAMS, which apparently weren’t good enough. I was starting to have doubts about the job and the date was approaching, so I quickly edited the paperwork.

It must have been enough, because the next day they asked for something else – a full list of all the people who’d be on site along with their relevant qualifications. 

We’ve never had good internet connection here and it took a lot of scanning and emailing to get 30-plus certificates to the water company, using up a considerable amount of sunny evening I could have spent being a dad, shooting or drinking beer in the garden. 

By the end of week two, the apprentice had learned a few things – tea making, raking, bringing home tools, not adding red diesel to the fuel tanks of chainsaws – but not much about trees.

“It’s an oak,” I found myself saying, having asked the blank-faced youth whether he could identify any trees. “You should know that one. Everybody knows an oak.” But not Ian.

That evening I sent off a couple of first-aid certificates and a hastily improvised pollution prevention plan in case six or seven drops of bio chain oil somehow entered the canal, also home to dozens of diesel barges and chemical toilets.

Ian finished his work experience and I was pleased and surprised when he later sent me an email saying that he’d enjoyed it. I vowed to do more the following year. 

I liked Ian. He was okay in his own way and never complained when he was with us. On the other hand, I really did not like the authority I was dealing with. The planned date was already very close when I got the penultimate correspondence from them. I don’t recall the exact wording so

I’m using a bit of ‘writer’s licence’ here, but it was the final straw for me.

“The (name of authority) approves use of the towpath on the following conditions ...”

There followed a long list of stuff we had to do. I really can’t remember all of it, but I realised that we weren’t going to comply when it referred to “a person qualified in life-saving in open water”.

I skipped the next bit and skim read for a few pages until the bit about “a vessel on the water in case a person enters the waterway”. 

So I needed a lifeboat? 

I imagined a tree surgeon falling from the tree, rolling several yards across a tow path with enough momentum to smash through a thicket of reeds before coming to rest in six inches of mud, or worse, ending up in the middle of the canal, knee deep and screaming for help.

I picked up the phone and apologised to the customer. We weren’t going to cut her tree after all.
I went past the house a few weeks later and noticed that the branch had gone, probably sawn off by a bloke in his seventies with a ladder and more sense than me. 

And as for Ian? I have absolutely no idea, but good luck to him wherever he is.